...A “hundred-year flood” sounds like a factor of time, as if the land were expected to flood only once every 100 years, but what it’s really meant to express is risk — the land has a 1 percent chance of flooding each year. As waters rise, though, flooding in low-lying places without sea walls, like Larchmont-Edgewater, will become more and more common until the presence of water is less about chance and more about certainty.

And few insurers are willing to bet against a certainty.

Nice touch of understatement there, I thought.

... As storm damage becomes more costly, it has left the N.F.I.P. tens of billions of dollars in debt and federal officials scrambling to bridge the divide between the rapidly growing expense of insuring these properties and the comparatively tiny, taxpayer-subsidized premiums that support it.

Staton married and left Norfolk, renting out her house as she followed her husband’s job in the military. But eventually she was paying nearly $6,000 in flood premiums on top of her mortgage every year, nearly always more than she could make in rent. “I decided to cut my losses and get out,” she said. “The flood insurance kept going up, and I was drowning in it.” A real estate agent she consulted told her that she’d be lucky to sell the house for $180,000, barely more than half of what she paid for it and significantly less than what she still owed on the mortgage. Everyone looking at places near the river, the agent said, asked about flood insurance first. It wasn’t the risk of high waters that spooked buyers; it was the certainty of high premiums.

In 1998, “repetitive-loss properties,” buildings that flood over and over, accounted for 2 percent of N.F.I.P.’s insured properties but 40 percent of its losses; since then, such losses have only increased.

2016, when there were floods in Louisiana, Texas, Virginia and elsewhere, managed to be the third-most-expensive year in the N.F.I.P.’s history [after Katrina and Sandy] even with no single standout catastrophe

...$1.1 trillion in property assets along the Eastern Seaboard lie within the path of a hundred-year storm surge.

“That’s a very staggering number,” says AIR’s chief research officer, Jayanta Guin — and it represents only the risk on that coast, and only under current sea levels.

By the 2030s...annual losses from storm surges in coastal areas around the world could double.

...Sean Becketti, the chief economist for Freddie Mac, cautioned in a report last year that economists aren’t sure if coastal property values will decline gradually, as the life expectancy of homes shrinks, or precipitously, “the first time a lender refuses to make a mortgage on a nearby house or an insurer refuses to issue a homeowner’s policy.”

Wetlands Watch compared the number of people on the FEMA waiting list in Norfolk with the number of houses raised in a year, and concluded that it would take 188 years to complete them all.

By then, of course, waters would be far higher.

This is the hardest reality to discuss, Stiles said, and a reason flood insurance is serving as a kind of advance scout into a more difficult future.

“When you go out to the end of the century, some of these neighborhoods don’t exist, so it’s hard to get community engagement,” he said. “Nobody wants to talk beyond where the dragons are on the map, into uncharted territory.”

And then there's:Sea level rise could send U.S. ‘climate migrants’ fleeing to Austin, Atlanta

Sea level rise is typically thought of as a coastal problem, with cities from New York to San Francisco pondering new coastal defenses such as sea walls and sturdier buildings.

However, by making large swaths of the U.S. shoreline uninhabitable by the end of this century, sea level rise could reverberate far inland, too. In fact, every single U.S. state will be affected by climate change-induced sea level rise, a new study found..

If the global average sea level rises by 1.8 meters, or nearly 6 feet, by 2100 — which is well within the mainstream projections from recent studies — 13.1 million Americans could migrate away from coastal areas during this time period, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change

Dohboi,This insurance message is not new. It's been coming out of the WEF global risk assessment for a few years. Munich RE has been out front. For. While Lloyds was denying CC risks but they got onboard a couple of years ago also.

At a WED symposium a Munich RE representative talked clearly about how the insurance industry can not cover the anticipated losses and how responsible governments realize that in this new risk environment they, the governments, are the "insurer of last resort." I think that is what you are describing, the insurance industry is pushing the risk into the public sector.

Eventually the increased premiums will start to starve the economy and will become a political topic. But likely far too late.

Yeah, we've had earlier discussions on this. I think people here were talking about this likely consequence, though, long before anything like it hit the MSM.

So I like to see how the MSM starts to cover it as it is actually unfolding. Of course, it would have been much more responsible for them to cover it before it was at our doorstep, so to speak, so that more people could have started making rational decisions about where to settle earlier (assuming rationality really comes into play in such decisions, in the short term, at first).

I think most people just looked at the official slr projections, which until quite recently was one meter by century end at most. Now that the meter figure is more of a mininum floor, and that some areas are already seeing consequences, it has become more real, of course. But I think few fully figured out that the economic consequences were likely to far predate the actual physical ones.

dohboi wrote:Warmer ocean waters and increased acidification act together to dissolve the shells of some sea creatures.

The warmer waters make the creatures change their body chemistry, adding more magnesium, which then predisposes them to being dissolved by acidic waters. “They were trying to grow but were dissolving at the same time” – a pretty sad image.

As I keep harping on, the biotic chemistry of the ocean surface layer is the big unknown monster associated with AGW. CO2 does not create ocean anoxia. Changes in biotic activity do. From all that I can tell about, the atmospheric CO2 will be converted into CH4 and released back into the atmosphere in a fast, anoxic carbon cycle trapped near the surface. Forget about clathrate melt. That is another bomb waiting to go off.

MSM and SLR and insurance. What makes you think they will ever cover it? Maybe a few local color shots about some poor folks tradgedy, especially if some kids die. But I don't think you will ever see any kind of MSM coverage, it's just not something that fits the 15 second sound bite format. It's not entertaining.

Demand and financing could collapse before the sea consumes a single house

The effects of climate-driven price drops could ripple across the economy, and eventually force the federal government to decide what is owed to people whose home values are ruined by climate change...

“Nobody thinks it’s coming as fast as it is,” said Dan Kipnis, the chairman of Miami Beach’s Marine and Waterfront Protection Authority, who has been trying to find a buyer for his home in Miami Beach for almost a year, and has already lowered his asking price twice.

I just posted something from MSM about slr and insurance, so I guess they are already covering it.

(First you tell me that it's not new, and when I point out that it's new that it's in the media, you say it never will be in the media!!?? Maybe I should just give up posting here? )

dis--interesting. I hadn't heard that chemistry before. Why would cabonic acid come back into the atmosphere as CH4? Do you have a link on that? (And please don't tell cid about this! )

CO2 contributes to the mass of biota in the ocean surface layer via phytoplankton, algae, etc. growth. Due to anoxic conditions at the base of the increasingly shallow oxic layer, more CH4 (and CO2) is produced from the decomposition of dead biota. The type of bacteria that operate in anoxic zones and remineralize detritus tend to generate CH4.

This is the basis for Guy McPhersons assertion that humans will go extinct in 30 years. If the ocean dies we will die with it. Given the state of The Great Barrier Reef we are well on our way

A Solar fuel spill is otherwise known as a sunny day!The energy density of a tank of FF's doesn't matter if it's empty.https://monitoringpublic.solaredge.com/solaredge-web/p/kiosk?guid=19844186-d749-40d6-b848-191e899b37db

onlooker wrote:http://www.theinertia.com/environment/a-horrifying-new-study-found-that-the-ocean-is-on-its-way-to-suffocating-by-2030/A Horrifying New Study Found that the Ocean is on its Way to Suffocating by 2030

Yet one more piece of evidence. I expect that by 2040 there will be a large increase in CH4 emissions from the oceans that is not related to the cryosphere. This will put warming in overdrive relatively fast and no amount of adaptation and policy changes is going to save humanity's sorry arrogant ass.

onlooker wrote:http://www.theinertia.com/environment/a-horrifying-new-study-found-that-the-ocean-is-on-its-way-to-suffocating-by-2030/A Horrifying New Study Found that the Ocean is on its Way to Suffocating by 2030

Yet one more piece of evidence. I expect that by 2040 there will be a large increase in CH4 emissions from the oceans that is not related to the cryosphere. This will put warming in overdrive relatively fast and no amount of adaptation and policy changes is going to save humanity's sorry arrogant ass.

You Dissident are someone with the expertise to put this into context, even if it is depressing

Do I remember correctly that some time ago you were one arguing with acid about the Arctic methane bomb.

Are you now of a different opinion?

These are totally different physical processes. You should know this if you paid attention and apparently you don't since your question is a total non sequitur.

The schedule for the surface ocean anoxic regime appears to be much faster than the cryosphere CH4 bomb given the available information. The latter will follow a nonlinear curve somewhat like the glacier melt resulting in sea level rise. Not much action until the warming penetrates deep enough into the seabed and land permafrost. On land the heat penetration is being accelerated by water intrusion which was not taken into account before much like the surface water melt on the Greenland ice sheet accelerating the ice flow and loss. But the breakdown of seabed and land ice remains much slower than the rapid ocean surface layer transition.

You are right, I only pay so much attention to this issue. But why should I? It not like there is something I can do about it. As for my personal welfare,nice done about what planning I can do. I do scan for interest and updates, to see if there is actionable information. It's interesting to think you and Cid roughly agree on the timescale to disaster, if not the explicit route. But otherwise I try to live my life happily.